Let’s face it – too much of the food chain is broken | Lucy Siegle

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With equal regularity the authorities reassure us that they have it under control. The risks are low. We have a food chain of unparalleled sophistication and all is basically well in this best of all culinary cornucopias.

The truth, however, is that the structures established in the wake of previous scandals to ensure our food is not only safe and wholesome, but is also what it claims to be, are being quietly dismantled. Just when Brexit demands a well-resourced, home-grown capacity to safeguard food standards, we are shrinking our capabilities. Local authorities – a crucial pillar in the edifice since they have legal responsibility for testing foods sold in their areas – are so starved of money that they have cut checking to the bone. Public analysts, who used to be busy producing results for them, describe labs that are only kept going with private commissions as their public work falls away.

Faced with a collapse in local authority funding for enforcement, the Food Standards Agency is rewriting the whole basis of food regulation. It is looking to shift the burden and cost of inspection to the private sector. It says this will make it better able to cope with the new demands of a globalised food system. But its language betrays the government’s ideologically driven deregulatory agenda. Controls are to be “proportionate and risk-based”; “administrative burdens” on business are to be reduced; “relationships with industry improved”; and the agency’s understanding is to become “more commercially astute”. Businesses, especially big ones that are regarded as generally compliant with the rules, will be rewarded with a light touch from government and increasing acceptance of privatised inspection and certification schemes.

Have we forgotten so quickly that businesses generally compliant with the rules sold us industrial-scale adulteration of the food supply when they gave us horsemeat mislabelled as beef – or in the case of Asda, tonnes of undeclared offal in burgers that claimed to be beef? It was generally compliant abattoirs too that produced chicken so routinely contaminated with the potentially lethal food-poisoning bug campylobacter that 280,000 people in the UK were made sick with it year after year.

The Food Standards Agency, at its best a model of transparent working in the public interest, has shrunk from the eight floors it once occupied at London Aviation House to less than two. The Tories had hoped to abolish it. Instead, it had a destructive reorganisation imposed on it by the coalition government, with key functions around nutritional quality and labelling moved back in to Whitehall departments and responsibilities fragmented. It has lost crucial expertise. Initially fiercely independent, it saw the composition of its board shift to members with industry links. At times it now appears cowed into protecting commercial interests more than consumers.

Look at just one of this summer’s scares to see how this may play out. Hepatitis E used to be an illness caught by people travelling, especially to countries with poor sanitation; but now as many as 100,000 people a year are thought to contract the virus in the UK, mostly from eating infected meat at home. The virus affects the liver and, while its symptoms mostly go unnoticed, it has the potential to cause severe illness. The risk is indeed low statistically, as the Food Standards Agency has advised, but if you are one of the unlucky ones the consequences can be devastating, especially if you are pregnant or immuno-suppressed. It can lead to miscarriage and stillbirth, and it can cause cirrhosis.

UK scientists have detected the genetic material of the hepatitis E virus in 10% of retail sausages

Over 90% of British pigs have been infected with Hepatitis E, but the particular strain of the virus behind the rising numbers of reported illness in the UK has not so far been found in British herds. However, manufacturers use cheaper European pork imports for many processed and fast foods and this is infected with the relevant strain. UK scientists have detected the genetic material of the hepatitis E virus in 10% of retail sausages.

Concerns resurfaced this week after the publication of research by Public Health England. It reported that cases of the illness in the UK were associated with eating own-brand pork sausages and ham from a particular supermarket. The Food Standards Agency advised cooking pork thoroughly. (Tricky, if you are using ready-to-eat ham.) It told us pregnant women should seek the advice of their GPs. (Good luck with that.)

You may think British consumers are entitled to know which supermarket’s products were identified, but initially neither PHE nor the Food Standards Agency would say. It was left to the press to claim it was Tesco.

Tesco itself initially declined to comment on the allegation directly. Following Guardian inquiries on Tuesday about the basis for keeping the public in the dark, Tesco and PHE changed their position and put out coordinated responses on Wednesday. The supermarket confirmed that its products were involved but said it only used British pork in manufacturing. PHE said it had not named the company because no fault was attached to it, and that it had not found that Tesco products directly caused hepatitis E, a point Tesco was keen to highlight. (PHE’s epidemiological studies do not of course by definition seek to prove cause, but look for association.) Perhaps this is what improved relationships between authorities and industry and more astute commercial understanding looks like, but what clearer role for a robust regulator could there be?

Hepatitis E is a mutating virus, infecting a large proportion of pig herds globally, capable of transmission to humans through meat. Why it has taken such a hold on farms is not known, although modern production methods are likely to be a factor. Who else will develop the tests currently lacking that pinpoint when its presence in pig meat is an active risk to humans? Who would want it to be left to contractors paid by industry to commission those tests and decide what to do with the results? Who else can unpick the conundrum of British pig herds apparently being free of the hepatitis E strain that makes people ill while products said to be sourced from British pigs are apparently associated with the illness?

There is another model for regulating the food industry. The Food Standards Agency itself has used it to great effect recently. For years it urged the meat sector to clean up its act on campylobacter, to little avail. Finally it decided to name and shame supermarkets and abattoirs for their contamination levels. It came under intense pressure from both industry and ministers to back down, but with a little help from the press, stood its ground.

The improvement since has been dramatic. So before we have another food scandal, let’s hear less about reducing burdens on business, and more about the crucial role of an active state in giving the public the protection it deserves.